Too Short: He Loves Her (WARNING: Dirty, Dirty, Dirty!)
This track by Too $hort is, like almost every other track by Too $hort, a sex rhyme. What makes it unusual is that it’s about two women getting it on, very specifically without the presence of a man:
juices flowin like a stream
with no man in between
feels like a dream
It’s a surprising turn for $hort to take, but then the record it’s from is called Married to the Game and features women in bridal lingerie on the cover, so perhaps $hort has begun exploring the needs and interests of women more generally. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that he could keep writing dirty rhymes for this many years without occasionally thinking about them, at least a little.
Too $hort has the curious distinction of being the first West Coast rapper to make it big, and he remains a huge seller to this day, having sustained an unusually long and successful rap career despite a notable lack of talent. What he does have is a dirty mind, and just like 2 Live Crew, he figured out how to turn filth into gold.
I first learned of Mr. $hort at the Hebrew Academy of San Francisco, in seventh grade, when my classmate Ben, something of a basketball genius, started hanging out with the black kids at a gym in Marin City and came back with fascinating musical finds. Too $hort’s Freaky Tales, a catalogue of perverted women the young $hort had known, was passed back and forth on a walkman in the lunchroom and carefully memorized like a secret code.
It was also around this time that Ben introduced us to 2 Live Crew’s first record, featuring We Want Some Pussy, and Kool Moe Dee’s solo debut, featuring Go See the Doctor, a song about STDs. He was also devoted to a buzzing, jangling record called Yo! Bum Rush the Show, by a group called Public Enemy, but that didn’t catch on with the rest of us at the time, who were anyway moving toward an exclusive devotion to thrash metal that would last until Guns N’ Roses arrived late the next year to shake things up. (Via The Tofu Hut.)